Danish Ballet Steps Outside the Box

COPENHAGEN — It’s an odd fact that until now, the Royal Danish Ballet, one of the world’s great classical companies, has never danced “La Bayadère,” one of a relatively small group of important full-length ballets, and an international staple since Natalia Makarova first staged a version of Marius Petipa’s 1877 ballet, for American Ballet Theater, in 1980.

Although the company has long performed other major 19th-century works, like “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” it might be that the Royal Danish Ballet’s own rich and distinctive heritage of ballets by August Bournonville has left previous artistic directors feeling no urgent need to take on new large-scale Russian classics and their particular stylistic demands.

But with a new production of “Bayadère,” which opened Saturday night at the Old Stage and sets the ballet in an Anglo-Indian colonial universe, the Royal Danish Ballet’s current artistic director, Nicholaj Hubbe, clearly signals a desire for a broader, more international identity.

With this “Bayadère,” Mr. Hubbe suggests that the Royal Danish Ballet can dance a major work by Marius Petipa just as easily as it can perform the Bournonville pieces that have been in its repertory since the early 19th century, or Alexei Ratmansky’s new “Golden Cockerel,” which had its premiere here in September.

Mr. Hubbe has reason to be broader in his outlook. Although he trained at the Royal Danish Ballet School and danced with its parent company, he was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet for most of his career. Since retiring from the stage in 2008 to take over the direction of the Royal Danish Ballet, he has restaged two Bournonville pieces (“La Sylphide” and “A Folk Tale”), but he has also focused on expanding the company’s range, speaking in interviews of his desire for the company to be known for more than its Bournonville tradition.

It’s not certain that the Royal Danish Ballet is ever going to be known for its “Bayadère.” The production is based on the traditional Petipa version with its score by Ludwig Minkus, but it has new choreography by Mr. Hubbe and the Russian-trained Eva Draw, who have moved the story from a mythic India to a turn-of-the-century colonial world.

Instead of the Indian warrior hero, Solor, we have a British officer, Sir William Sibley, in love, as in the original, with an Indian temple dancer Nikiya. Instead of the Rajah’s daughter Gamzatti, who Solor is obliged to marry, we have Lady Emma Ashbury, the daughter of the British Vice-Consul and his intended fiancée.

It’s a potentially intriguing recasting of the narrative, since it intensifies the theme of forbidden love (Nikiya, as a temple dancer, is a holy virgin of sorts) and — at least in theory — infuses the drama with issues of race and social class.

But Mr. Hubbe’s production doesn’t go much further than aesthetic window dressing. Sir William’s fellow soldiers are Brits in khaki shorts; the engagement celebrations take place at a garden party; Sir William and Lady Emma dress up in Indian costumes to dance for their guests. This seems rather unlikely, but it’s another chance to show off some of Richard Hudson’s delightfully eye-popping, colorful costumes.

There’s not much more to the recasting of the plot than this, and there is nothing in the staging that makes us look anew at the Sir William-Nikiya relationship, think particularly hard about colonialism or imperialism, or see the ballet as anything more than the melodramatic fairytale it has always been.

The charming story-book stage designs, also by Mr. Hudson, only reinforce the ballet’s distance from any pretensions to realism.

Photo

A scene from the Royal Danish Ballet’s version of ‘‘La Bayadère.’’Credit
Costin Radu

What this “Bayadère” does do successfully, however, is to offer us stage surrogates — the British contingent — for our own consumption of exoticism. The ballet speaks to the late-Romantic vogue for orientalism and pageantry, bejeweled, veiled women and bare-chested, exotically garbed men.

The problem here is that the presentation of the officers and their Edwardian-costumed wives on stage is as mythic and stereotypical as the brightly costumed, midriff-baring dancers who perform for them.

Sir William, danced by Alban Lendorf, is the very model of a modern major-general, all manly bearing and buttoned-up rectitude. Nikiya (J’aime Crandall) is modest and tragic. Lady Emma (Lena-Maria Gruber, not always fully equal to the technical demands of the role) is full of brusque, autocratic confidence.

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None emerge with any real conviction as dramatic personalities. Mr. Lendorf is a superb dancer, with a light, airy jump, brilliant articulation in beaten footwork and a lovely, lyrical use of arms. But he is either over-doing Sir William’s repressed Britishness or unsure of how to portray his character, conveying little sense of a man desperately conflicted between love and duty.

Although ardent enough in his pas de deux with Ms. Crandall, Mr. Lendorf didn’t seem particularly bothered by having to marry Ms. Gruber. Ms. Crandall, also a fine dancer, with a bounding jump and beautiful line, brought little of the lush plasticity and sensuality to her Nikiya that might have suggested why she would have captivated a man entirely outside her social class and culture.

These rather stiff characterizations may be what Mr. Hubbe and Ms. Draw intended. Or it may be that the dancers are still feeling their way into a new work.

The Royal Danish ballet has a fine tradition of character roles, shaped by the Bournonville ballets, but it’s a subtler, smaller-scaled style of acting than the larger-than-life, less tasteful, theatrics of “Bayadère” demand. Only Mads Blangstrup, as the Brahmin who is also in love with Nikiya, provided something of this more expansive projection, stalking about the stage with a hip-swaying swagger that, in conjunction with his turban and bare chest, provided a cheeringly camp note.

Mr. Hubbe and Ms. Draw have changed a few features in the first two acts: Sir William has a new solo, the traditional “parrot” dance is replaced by a charming dance for children with peacock fantails, and the pas d’action has more men than women, possibly to give the excellent Danish men a chance to show off their marvelously clean allegro technique. The Bronze Idol, well-danced by Jon Axel Fransson, is now a blue god.

The third and most famous act, however, the all-white “Kingdom of the Shades,” remains intact. (The original version boasts a fourth act and a falling temple, but most current productions omit it, as does this one.)

Act III is usually shown as Solor’s opium-induced dream, but here it succeeds Sir William’s suicide as a vision of a heavenly afterlife in which he is reunited with Nikiya. The scene begins with the white-clad Shades descending from a ramp in a hypnotic, repetitive procession that offers a hallucinogenic vision of the heroine metamorphosized into an endless line of women.

Here, the company came into its own, offering a perfectly synchronized, breathing-as-one, poetic distillation of the formality and purity of classical ballet. The effect was much aided by Anders Poll’s misty, opalescent lighting.

For the gloriously pure dancing of the third act alone, this “Bayadère” is well worth seeing. For the rest, well, it’s pleasant enough, and you can understand why Mr. Hubbe wants his company to perform the work. But although he comes frustratingly close to providing a “Bayadère” that might — as Bournonville’s work did — offer some links to the audience’s world, that doesn’t happen. It’s another nice night at the ballet.